Dead Man's Curve
“ Live as if you were already dead”
~unsourced “Zen” saying, as quoted by poet Marvin Bell.
“You don’t come back/from Dead Man’s Curve…”
~20th Century American Pop Song by Jan & Dean
The Dead Man as Poseur
The Dead Man is living as if he’d been alive, because he has it all backwards.
The Dead Man is primarily a pretentious but not harmless twit, prowling the internet, squinting at some tasty wisdom he thinks he can consume like a burrito.
He likes the way the monks' robes swish as they rake the rocks
in the sand gardens of sleeping neurons deep within an electric foreign tranquility, and thinks he must just totally must,
have that app.
He’s staring at his navel, and sighing over the Bodhi tree; a plastic green predecorated scotch pine in the window of the home warehouse store.
Of course, there’s no reason he couldn’t sit beneath the tree, but he worries about store security, and really, he just doesn’t have the time, even though he’s supposed to be Dead
for quite awhile.
His watch hasn’t stopped, on it tocks, so he’s still late. (If you’re pressed for time as a corpse, certainly you have no time to lose.)
But he can’t tell time very well anymore, what with the being so Dead and all.
If his eyelids hadn’t rotted,
if his eyeballs weren’t a crow’s canapé,
he still would look at everything and see nothing.
More about the Dead Man as Poseur
There is no more, except a Dead Man’s ego that stalks cyberfinity
and hides in the picture of a prettier girl smiling in her prom dress.
There is no more, except the Dead Man’s maw of ever gaping hunger
that dips ink brushed parchment into chocolate, and deep fries a butterfly on a stick under a maraschino cherry tree.
There is no more, except the Dead Man’s fear that the bottomless void
will suck the Dead brains right out of him and spit them into a peanut shell.
There is no more, because someone
buried the Dead Man alive.
December 2010
Sheila Moore is hosting this week, and her prompt is to write a poem using the poetic device of onomatopoeia.
Process Notes: Hi, all. I am enduring some kind of nasty crud that leaves me unfit for poetic composition, or sitting up for long, so I went looking for an existing poem for the prompt. Apparently I don't use onomatopoeia much in my writing, but I found a little bit of it here, in a poem originally written in response to a prompt at the now defunct Big Tent Poetry, to write a “Dead Man’s poem” a la Marvin Bell, who's made quite a thing of this form. There are four of his Dead Man Poems at the preceding poets.org link if you want to see what they're supposed to be like--I'm afraid I found the whole thing pretentious and went off the reservation in this satire of the genre.
~*~
Disclaimer: I cannot find any source in Zen Buddhist literature for the saying Mr. Bell has used to create his genre of Dead Man's Poetry. Internet searches on these keywords will return only Mr Bell as a source. While this does not detract in any way from the independent merit of his work, I would take the assumption that it has any real citable source in Zen tradition with a grain of salt. It seems more likely to me that this is a corruption of the famous quote attributed to Gandhi: "Live as if you will die tomorrow." But that's just me.
